B3 Chapter 22 - Takeover

Bianca had been a child like any other, once upon a time. Her early years and education hadn’t proceeded like any normal child’s would have, but apart from her accelerated learning period, she hadn’t differed all that much from, say, a prismatic child.

That was what she’d thought. It had not turned out to be true. She had been different from birth, the result of decades of Aurian experimentation and the only successful result of their attempts to create so-called “blank-slate” magicians with the ability to spec into any type of magic rather than the single or dual specializations that most elite magicians had.

None of this was anything she’d known growing up as a member of royalty. That had waited until she had turned twelve and had in turn been notified that her unique traits as a magician were in demand for one specific special unit. Curious about that, she’d taken the offer.

That had been in 58 AFI. Now, seventeen years later by most metrics and twenty-three by her own, she was only five biological years older but significantly more experienced in mind. She could hardly remember what life had been like before she’d bound her flux pool to another magician.

A lot had changed in that timespan, but there were other aspects that hadn’t.

Before she had become a military mage, Bianca had been raised to be a second-in-command of Auria. The king had no plans on retiring or dying, but even he had recognized the necessity of leaving someone to manage the country if he was indisposed.

Methods of managing the country would be different now. The situation now was nothing like it once had been—then, the king had been trying to control his people and hide the possibility of another war. Now, the very battle Auria had feared had come and gone, leaving the country devastated in its wake. The job was entirely different.

The only important part of her training was the mental readiness. The people she was claiming dominion over weren’t hers, not yet, but they would be. Bianca was prepared to become their ruler, their arbiter of life and death. She was ready to spend lives to preserve others.

It was a natural development. She had been taught the way of the crown and that of the wand. She was working on perfecting the latter. It was about time the first came into play.

#

The spread of the Viridian-Incarnate message ruffled fewer feathers than one might have expected. There were already hundreds of thousands relying on Viridian-Incarnate facilities to stay alive. The extended shelter cities they’d established had become safe havens for many civilians and magicians incapable of or unwilling to scavenge and kill for safety outside their boundaries. Though their conditions weren’t amazing, they were relatively hygienic and provided clean water, food, and safety.

The people it actually needed to reach were the rest. Scavengers, isolated pockets of formerly Aurian cities governed by local non-prismatic groups, and even the scattered Cascadians. Both countries had been torn apart by the initiation of the war—Auria by Cascadia, Cascadia by Pride.

Whether or not it was successful right off the bat was anyone’s guess. Viridian-Incarnate’s prediction was that it wouldn’t immediately, but that was within bounds.

Viridian-Incarnate wasn’t exactly the correct title for that coalition anymore, though. Technically speaking, they used the title of Auria.

“Are you sure about this?” Jennifer asked. “Maybe a bit late for that, but…”

She and Syl were parked right outside the entrance to a still-active Aurian black site. It had operated under the king and hadn’t stopped for the war—most black sites were secured enough that they could continue function even if they were cut off from the outside world, including this one.

This one was inside a mountain in the Sierra Nevada range, and it had avoided the bulk of the fighting so far. It hadn’t even been at risk from any fragment that had gotten dangerously close to the surface.

“We’re at full production capacity,” Syl said. “Incarnate is a specialized engineering agency designed to service the needs of individual customers. It is not an industrial manufacturing group.”

“Neither is this,” Jennifer countered.

“Correct. Every piece of critical manufacturing infrastructure in Auria was targeted during the beginning of the war, and any plant that went down at the start of it has not yet come back. That leaves these and out-of-country locations.”

“I suppose so. You have a way in?”

In lieu of a response, Syl pointed at the side of the mountain. A second later, without a single word, a tunnel carved its way through, matter simply removed by the strategic-class annihilation-type spell Obliterate.

“That should connect to the actual entrance.”

He led the way through, an FCD snapping into place over his body with every step, interlocking chain links forming full coverage over him.

Jennifer hadn’t seen this in person yet, but she knew by now what that was called. Horizon Breaker.

“I don’t think bombing them out of existence is going to help much with getting manufacturing tools,” she said.

Syl turned to face her, walking backwards as Horizon Breaker continued to link itself to his body.

“They don’t recognize this face,” he said, pointing at the stolen faceplate with the voice synthesizer he’d taken off the Red patriarch.

Syl took it off and tossed it to Jennifer, letting the rest of Horizon Breaker snap over him. Electric blue lines lit up, tracing blood vessels through his body. Darker lines ignited where his eyes and mouth were.

His favored combat FCD had no voice synthesizer in hit. Syl signed instead. Jennifer’s sign wasn’t very strong, but she’d made it enough of a priority to pick up what he was saying.

They’ll know this one.

At the end of the tunnel Syl had created was a second, vertical entrance meant to be traveled by an elevator. They jumped down it instead, both using simple A-class magic to slow their fall enough to reach the bottom without injury.

Pressure built as they fell, weighing down on their shoulders like physical weight. A side effect of dense, concentrated flux. Abnormally high even for a magic-heavy facility like this one, but it was a secret base. Even through her suppressive glasses, Jennifer could tell there was denser magic here.

There was a vault gate of the regular, technological variety not far from them. Syl opened that one without even visibly using magic.

There were magicians on the other side, of course—this was a facility meant for the mass production of stockpiled conventional and flux weapons, and nothing like that would go without a security detail.

All of them were watching the door silently, FCDs raised. They lowered them as the two of them entered.

“What the hell?” Jennifer muttered.

Syl’s arrival seemed to be the catalyst they had been waiting for. Each of the magicians slowly moved towards them, approaching him. He made no move to stop them.

And in turn, each of them knelt.

“What did you tell them?” Jennifer asked. Even a scan of the area with her flux-sensitive eyes didn’t reveal any mind-affecting magic that he could have pumped in, not to mention the fact that she would have noticed it hitting her.

Syl looked back at her, tapping his wrist.

She looked at her FCD. Seeing nothing, she had it connect to the net here and pulled up recent wide-broadcast messages.

There was one. It read simply.

You know who I am. You know who I represent. Surrender and you will live another day under the flag we once served.

You know the consequences of fighting back.

It was only then that the magical pressure started to lighten up and Jennifer realized the effect she’d mistakenly attributed to the environment—a natural conclusion given the scale of the operation they were trying to take—hadn’t been from the manufacturing facility at all. In fact, looking at the factory they’d walked into suggested that its processes had been paused.

All of that had been Syl and Syl alone.

They know him here, she thought distantly. Just like how Aaron had known him, only these people were older. Magicians who had served in and survived the last war. They didn’t know him as an engineer but as Auria’s very own silent archmage.

He looked at her pointedly, and Jennifer remembered she still had a role to play.

“This facility is now under New Aurian control,” she said. The tentative name of their new ruling body still didn’t quite sit right with her, but it was what it was. “We will be temporarily commandeering your production capacity for the purpose of manufacturing magical equipment for Aurian citizens.”

One of the senior magicians turned towards her as if he’d just realized she existed.

“You’re his engineer,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“I am an engineer,” Jennifer replied with a shrug. “I don’t work on his FCD. I do work for him.”

Technically not the truth, but she wasn’t stupid enough to claim that she was a solo act here. These people practically worshipped Syl.

“Then you’re welcome to use it,” he said gruffly. “We’ve had no orders. Last news we saw, the country was in flames.”

“It still is,” Jennifer said. “We’re working on it.”

“Do as you will, then,” the magician replied. “Let us know if you need anything.”

The process of getting fabs that weren’t specially designed for artifact machining to create them was less complicated than it sounded but still a pain. Jennifer wasn’t the most used to handling it on her own, either, but she’d gotten it to work with Incarnate processes and could manage setting up a new one on her own.

“I’ll have other engineers coming over to finalize the setup later,” Jennifer said, stepping away after about half an hour of inputting her own programs. “This should be a good start for the time being.”

“If engineers are what you need, we’re open to training,” one of the magicians said.

Jennifer paused for a second, thinking that over. “I’ll instruct the engineers later to help you understand their processes. We have other sites to go to.”

“Understood.”

By the time they left, Jennifer felt like she’d just walked out of another world.

“What was that?” she asked Syl. “I mean, I guess you did threaten them, but why were they so eager to throw everything they had at us?”

Syl let Horizon Breaker fold itself back into his body, gesturing for Jennifer to give him the synthesizer back.

Once he had it back on, he used it to speak again.

“They knew who I was because I have worked with them before,” Syl said. “Almost everyone in there owes their life to me.”

“Oh.”

It was easy to forget sometimes that despite looking younger than her, Syl was not her age. He’d been active for a lot longer than she’d been. This wasn’t his first war.

“They won’t all be this easy,” he warned her. “There are those who will not respect the name. Others who don’t know who I am. Some will actively fight for the king.”

“I was expecting that,” Jennifer said. “I was wondering why you didn’t bring Uriel or Bianca.”

“Bianca is busy elsewhere. Uriel might join for the other ones, but I can probably handle most of them alone.”

“So you just need me to set it up, then?”

“Preferably.”

“I wasn’t the one to discover it.”

“Correct. I was. You have the best understanding of how to mass produce it, though. I do not engage with that. You always wanted your chance to improve the world, right? Here it is.”

There was something about the way the synthesizer software made him sound that sent an unpleasant shiver down Jennifer’s spine.

But he wasn’t wrong. As much as she thought there was something off about this man, this Sinner, she agreed with his mission, and it was through him and his company—his nation now, too—that she could do the most good.

“Then we’ll keep it going,” she said. “Where to next?”

They didn’t get to every location they were looking for in a day, but the process was more or less the same over the next week. One way or another, Syl would subjugate a black site or even an isolated city’s manufacturing plant, and Jennifer would repurpose it. They never hit food synthesizers or water plants, since those wouldn’t be helpful anyway, but they did reprogram almost every remaining major building capable of large-scale magical production.

All of it was for a single purpose: arming the populace.

It wasn’t exactly as dire as that, but the idea was similar. It had been a long-time goal of Syl’s to bring magic to those who weren’t talented at it, and they were now doing exactly that. That goal was now just one more step in a different overarching plan, but the magician himself had to admit to a little pride in that.

Refugees weren’t as organized as formal military units would be, but enough of them contributing magic could stop or slow a fragment. Making them more independent was a necessary step for the win condition of defeating the machines while keeping the human race alive.

Around the world, other parties took notice. Even with everyone in as much chaos as they were, leaders saw a new nation forming. It was young yet, but so was every other warlord-led body on the planet.

The difference, it seemed, was the support of two Sinners.

Paragons sensed the change in the winds. It was impossible not to. Something was changing in the world, and it was starting in war-torn Auria.

#

Even after so many fragments had hit Earth, there were thousands more in various degrees of decaying orbits, each of them threatening to drop and cause a potential extinction event, dumping billions of machined nanobots on a location and driving magicians into lunar madness even if they stopped the rock itself.

There were so many of them and such a thick layer of ash and dust in the air that nobody was tracking the ones with irregular behavior—mostly because all of them had irregular behavior.

This one, however, was irregular not because of the machines on it but the lack of them.

The Aurian king stirred, the dormant weapons underneath him whirring to life as he did.

“Down,” he ordered. 

They stopped.

Finally, he thought.

He’d waited and waited and waited after his last weapon had failed and he had been incapable of stopping what had come next.

Now, someone sought his throne. One of his own. The eyes he had left in his kingdom were few and far between now, but they could see enough to tell him that much.

The king hadn’t entirely failed, but he had already missed his greatest opportunity to save humanity. 

“We return to Earth soon,” he told the weapons that made up the fragment he owned. “Be ready.”

It was time to pass on the torch—and see if the magicians on the other end could handle the flame.